


Spoils of War

by fresne



Category: Napoleonic Era RPF
Genre: Gen, Yuletide 2015, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 15:52:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5422967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fresne/pseuds/fresne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not all that was won at the Battle of Vittoria was immediately apparent.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Spoils of War

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AlterEgon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlterEgon/gifts).



++++++++++  
General Miguel de Álava braced in preparation for when Wellington would say it. The moment stretched out as the General’s staff masticated their way through their evening meal. 

Wellington picked up his tin cup full of fine Burgundy, commandeered from a baggage train three days before with the men's compliments, and swirled his sip around in his mouth before swallowing. He did not say it. He put down his cup and there was the click of a knife cutting through cold sausage. He did not say it. Wellington bit into his hardtack. De Álava thought longingly of roast duck with a cherry brandy sauce for luncheon and moist suckling pig for supper. But as Wellington chewed, de Álava reminded himself that it was better to have success in the field, with no luncheon, and sausage for supper rather than defeat and a fine last meal of roast duck prior to execution.

De Álava had no idea how Wellington knew that the moment was right to strike, but no sooner had the thought crossed de Álava mind when Wellington dabbed his lips with his napkin and said, "We'll march at daybreak and have cold meat at day's end." De Álava thought it was a skill Wellington must have learned in India, and left it at that.  
+++  
It was a hard thing to the elder brother of Napoleon. 

Joseph had been a good lawyer, and he liked to think an excellent judge before the Revolution. His background had been excellent when convincing the Americans to ally with France. Although, the English were their own worst enemies there. He'd even been a decent King in Naples given that their financial system was little more than a barter system.

But his little brother had seen fit to make him King of godforsaken Spain with its constant battles, and what Joseph was not, nor would ever be, was a General. 

He looked up from the map at Marshal Jean-Baptiste Jourdan. "Is that bad?"

"Yes," that good man said with a voice nearly ground up by coughing. "It is very bad that the streets of Vittoria as so clogged with your personal baggage that the artillery cannot make their way through the town." Jourdan sneezed and then sneezed five more times. He really ought to have been in bed, but insisted on being up to plan their defences.

Joseph knew better than to suggest that the artillery make their way around the town. He'd made that mistake before and had had a very long, exquisitely detailed lecture on proper roads and their place in warfare from the time of the ancient Romans and their importance for heavy artillery in particular.

He hadn't told the Marshal what was in his personal effects, but if he lost Spain for his brother, he'd need some sort of sop to keep Napoleon happy. After all, his little brother could lose his entire army in Russia and it was the weather's fault, but Joseph couldn't lose half as much. And he was an idiot.

He looked down at the map. It looked like a map as far as he was concerned. He wished it were a torte or a will or a treaty or anything but a collection of lines and squiggles. He considered. 

"If the baggage gets out of the way, do you think you can rout the British?" After all, the best possibility was not to lose Spain in the first place.

Jourdan's aid-de-camp whispered something into Jourdan's ear. Jourdan blew his nose and whispered, "Yes!" He tapped a spot on the map, muttered something about the left flank, and impassable terrain, and started coughing again. 

Joseph said, "I'll see to the baggage then." 

He passed a young woman who had the most hideous mole on her right cheek he could have imagined as she brought a fresh bottle of port into the room. She bobbed a curtsey at him, "Your Majesty."

He said, "You'd better bring an orange rind for the Marshal." 

She giggled as if he'd suggested they sneak off for a quick tumble. "Yes, Your Majesty." 

He made himself stop looking at her mole. He mimed shoving something up his nostrils. "The rind is to clear his cold."

She looked down and fluttered a hand near her cheek, which only drew more attention to the unfortunate feature. She giggled, "Oh, Your Majesty."

He gave up and went to commandeer some horses to drag the baggage out of the way. If he'd been there to see the sharp way that same women regarded the map under the cover of refiling the glasses of the General staff, he might have reconsidered her intelligence. Then again, if Jourdan had seen just where Joseph was requisitioning the horses, he might have questioned Joseph's sanity. If he had voice enough to speak, that was.

But Joseph wasn't there to see, and Jourdan was busy removing a lung by coughing, so the moment passed and was gone.

+++

By this point, Arthur Wellington's staff no longer hissed in outrage when a gypsy showed up with a roll of paper, or a ragamuffin darted into camp, or a woman declaring herself to be the famed "Mosca del Fuego" strolled in demanding to see the General for a little assignation. 

If he'd learned anything in India, it was that wars are won by intelligence. Not that any plan survived contact with the enemy, but it was better to attack where the enemy didn't expect rather than where they did. 

Napoleon understood that, which was why he was worth forty-thousand men when he went into the field. Not that an actual forty-thousand reinforcements wouldn't overwhelm that advantage.

Arthur invited the overly made up Mosca del Fuego into his tent and raised an eyebrow at Nina Maria, Lady Azara, the Firefly, and some other dozen other assumed names. 

She rolled her eyes. "You think the French don't have their own spies in your camp?"

He hoped not, but conceded the point with a wave of his hand. The conversation was more than worth the gossip. "You're certain of this?" 

Now it was her turn to raise her eyebrows at him. "They're so convinced that the terrain from the north is impassable that King–" her lip curled, "Joseph is having seats constructed so the people of Vittoria can see the French defeat the Beau Douro. 

Arthur snorted a laugh and then stopped as he calculated the distance to Vittoria. It was some twenty miles. "My men will need scouts to guide them through the hills." 

She winked at him. "My sisters and I know every rock in the mountains." 

She drew a knife from her skirts, but he stopped her from imperilling the dignity of his tent. He lifted the edge. "Wait for Sir Graham at the Northern edge of the camp."

She made to crawl out from under the canvas and paused, "And the call sign." 

He wasn’t irritated with her caution, although it would take a bold Frenchman to manufacture twenty thousand troops. "The Donkey Serenade, of course." She laughed, hummed a few bars, and rolled out of his tent. 

He smoothed the creases of his perfectly flat trousers and then laughed. De Álava would no doubt be delighted to hear that they wouldn’t be marching at first light. Of course, they'd be leaving well before first light, but dawn would play no part in their manoeuvres. 

+++

The battle went a bit like a symphony with infantry, artillery, and cavalry playing their parts, which Arthur supposed some idiot would call Wellington's Victory.

It had gone like a well-orchestrated brawl, which was as well as could be hoped.

But Napoleon's brother had escaped. The French army had been allowed to retreat without even a bobtail cavalry to harry them because the British army had in its service the scum of the earth as common soldiers, who stopped to loot abandoned baggage rather than do their duty of pursuing the French. 

Arthur himself had had to stop them from pawing through Joseph Bonaparte's personal carriage. As it happened, the man's correspondence amounted to a pack of love letters and nothing of strategic significance about the fortifications to the North. At most, Arthur knew there was a Vauban fortress over the border, which he'd known already. 

Although, he couldn't have expected anything better of a man with a silver chamber pot. Arthur gave it the 14th Hussars in disgust. The last he'd seen of it, they'd been calling it the "Emperor" and filling it with champagne. As he considered the logistics of pursuing troops with a force of men who had already marched twenty miles and won a country that day. He agreed to take a cup of Joseph of Bonaparte's champagne. The men might be the scum of the earth, but the army had made fine fellows of them.

There had also been some two hundred or so paintings, but given they'd been pulled from their frames and used as tarpaulins to cover the mules’ baggage, they couldn’t be worth much. 

Still, he couldn't leave them there to rot in the rain. He had the lot sent to his brother to sift through.

+++

Kitty sighed over the wooden cases invading her drawing room. Her husband's brother might eventually free her when it suited him. She supposed she could wait for him, but she peevishly thought that she wanted to take tea in her favourite seat by her favourite window and listen to the world wheel by. Sometimes she wondered if it meant something that her husband was a bit deaf in one ear, while she was near sighted. If she were clever, she'd have made a quip about it, but all she could do was worry her children would grow mute, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Her oldest friend, Lady Sparrow said, "You're not putting up with this… this for the entirety of the war. Crack open Pandora and let's see what musty muck old Nosey sent you."

Kitty wished she could refer to her husband so casually. She wished a great many things, and sighed as she waved in the direction of a footman. She thought it was Gerald, but it might have been Thomas. They were both tall with blobs of blond hair on their heads. She squinted, but it didn't help. Still there was the sound of a crack as wood parted from nails, which was the important thing. Gerald or possibly Thomas held a painting up for her to peer at. She leaned closer. 

It was blue and somewhat red and green.

Lady Sparrow gasped. "Kitty, I don't think these are as worthless as Nosey thinks they are." 

Kitty peered at the blobs of oil on the canvas. She sighed, "I suppose we'll need to send for my husband's brother, Lord Maryborough."

Lady Sparrow laughed. It was such a pretty sound, but then, she still had her health. "Not a bit of it Kitty. We'll not let him steal your thunder. I have a friend at the Royal Pictures Gallery," which was meant Lady Sparrow had she'd donated some money for something or other. "I'll have him pop over and catalogue the lot," which meant it had been an absurd amount of money. 

Still, Kitty pictured her husband receiving a catalogue of masterpieces and imagined him smiling as he'd done when they were young and a good deal more foolish about the world. It was a pleasant dream while she sat in her favourite chair and listened to Lady Sparrow's friend, Mr. William Seguier, mutter and gasp. 

+++

Arthur pulled another painting to rest against his thighs. Brueghel's brushstrokes capturing a hazy summer's day. Cignani's luminous Venus gazing softly at Adonis, who forever reaches for his arrows. Coello's Saint Catherine of Alexandra leaning against the wheel that could not break her while eternally looking to something out of the frame. Elsheimer's Judith eternally poised to strike a blow against Holosfernes. Velequez, Raphael, Corregio, Titian, Van Dyke. There were few nation's Masters not represented in this pile presently leaning against his legs.

His brother, Henry said, "I'm telling you, I've applied to the Spanish Ambassador. They don't want them back."

Somewhere in the room, Catherine was wittering about where they would get enough rope to hang them from the walls. He'd have said, "Nails will be sufficient," if he were keeping them.

He wouldn't have thought this of all tasks would require that he correspond directly with his Majesty, but he would if he had to do so. The treasury of a kingdom was presently propping up walls and it would not stand.

+++

Count Fernan Nuñez, the Spanish Minister to England held the letter from the Conqueror's Conqueror in his hand and had to supress a smile at the increasingly irritated tone of the letter. The Duke of Wellington had sent a catalogue of paintings and wanted to know which ones the King of Spain thought might belong to him so that the Duke could send them back, at, of course, no expense to the King of Spain, since it was the Duke's own decision to send them to his home in England for safekeeping. He'd even paid for their restoration and reframing, as they'd been ill used on the way.

Nuñez had a secretary for such things, but he waved the man off, and with a wry tilt of the pen to his lips, dipped the nib in inky decision and wrote a reply, 

"Most Excellent Sir, Esteemed Duke and friend, I hand you enclosed the official reply which I have received from the Court, and from the same I gather that His Majesty, touched by your delicacy, does not wish to deprive you of that which has come into your possession by means as just as they are honourable. Such is my view of the case, and thus I believe you ought to let the matter rest where it stands and refer to it no longer. At any rate, whatever may have been your intention, I shall always be ready to act according to your wishes, not alone in this, but in all other matters in which I can be of assistance to you. 

Your devoted friend and Affectionate cousin, who salutes you, Fernan Nuñez "

+++

Nina paused in the stairwell. She hadn't expected to be greeted by a nude of Napoleon Bonaparte, but there he was. She waved her pinkie at him. 

Lady Catherine said, "It was a gift from the King of France," managing to gesture at the thing without looking at it. Nina wondered just why the King of France wanted to give Wellington a naked Napoleon, but she supposed it was like storing a grimoire at a monastery; perhaps the King thought it was the safest place for it.

Lady Catherine trudged ahead of her, while her husband in typical fashion had already mounted stairs and then reconnoitred back down again to see what was keeping them. Having determined there'd been no setbacks, climbed to the top again to resume speaking with his dear friend Mrs. Arbuthnot. 

Nina felt as if she should take the arm of the poor woman and tell her everything would be fine. But she was a fluffy chicken married to an eagle. Nina had to wonder if the woman averted her eyes every time she climbed the stairs, but did not ask. The English could be touchy about such things.

Lady Catherine turned halfway up. Nina braced herself for some form of accusation about her relationship with Wellington. Lady Catherine looked around the creamy curves of the walls before saying, "Whatever you do, don't ask him about whatever painting you're looking at." 

Nina blinked and put her arm through Lady Catherine's as if they were the best of friends, and smiled. "My Lady, with that dire warning, I think I must."

Lady Catherine sighed and continued to climb. Nina picked a landscape at random, which prompted Wellington to begin reciting the provenance of every painting in the room in a counter clockwise fashion. Nina amused herself thinking how odd he was, always just Wellington, but then again Caesar was simply Caesar. She steered Lady Catherine about the room, then she stopped and laughed. "I know this painting very well." Her hand was somewhere over her heart. "This is Judith chopping off Holofernes’s nasty old head. This painting is very important to me. See where she's lifting the blade?"

Lady Catherine squinted and nodded.

"The French came to… a dear friend's home and threatened to kill her and her husband if they did not hand over Judith. This painting saved their lives and so was lost to… them. And here I come to visit you, and I find her safe and sound in the best place she could be." 

Wellington walked over to the wall and would have plucked the painting off. "You must return it to them." 

Nina put her hand on his arm to stop him. "I know… they would want you to have it." 

Wellington cleared his throat and she let go of his arm. "Now I'll have to start again." Behind Nina, Lady Catherine sighed. 

Nina let Wellington's voice drift paint and provenance over her. Judith looked good where she was. 

In particular, she liked that as Judith poised to strike with the sword, she was gazing down at Napoleon's portrait below her on the wall. Wellington said, "That was a gift for an uninvited guest at dinner." 

"People do like to give Wellington Napoleons," quipped Mrs. Arbuthnot.

Nina did not comment on the full Napoleon in the stairwell. Instead she put her hands behind her back and slowly followed him to Waterloo, or at least the room where they kept the painting of that battle and listened to Wellington boom about art.

+++

The End

+++

**Author's Note:**

> Beyond being a work of fiction (and therefore by nature a bit libertine), I've taken some liberties to add the character of Nina from the 1937 movie "The Firefly", which also happens to (along a lot of singing and dancing) deal with the Battle of Vittoria. I've also ascribed to Nina some lines that Colonel Gurwood described on page 13 of,
> 
> https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/content/imported-docs/a-e/apsleyhouseartcatalogue.pdf
> 
> Also, the bit about the stadium seating is how the audio guide told the story of the Battle of Vitoria at Aspley House. So, although I've not been able to find anything to corroborate it, I'm keeping it as too juicy a detail to throw into the chamber pot for lack of proof.
> 
> The cold remedy of orange peels is from 
> 
> http://mentalfloss.com/article/53330/17-bizarre-natural-remedies-1700s
> 
> The letter written by Nunez is the text of the actual reply to Wellington's final (but not the first) attempt to return the King of Spain's art collection.
> 
> If after reading my fiction here, you would like to read more about me and my writing check out my profile.


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